


About Love

by JessaLRynn



Series: Jack & Giles [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Children, Gen, Kid Doctor, Some Humor, Twelfth Doctor Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 20:04:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6022984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor's youthful companion has a question for the other boy.  The Doctor, on forever feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	About Love

**Author's Note:**

> This is an original Doctor I created long before Ten had stepped down. He's a young boy, and so is his companion, Giles. They're usually in a lot of trouble. There's three stories with them, and there could always be more. This is the one I wrote for "Twelve Day" - 12/12/12 - back before there was a gray-haired fanboy at the helm of the TARDIS. I like him.

Two boys, young adolescents by the look of them, lay in the well kept grass and looked up at the stars. There was a sort of quiet contentment about them, a thoughtful softness that suited the warm autumn breeze and the stillness of the shining sky.

One of the boys, who seemed to perhaps be the older of the pair, was reciting, a lengthy list of tangling words, the names of everything he knew that he could see. Even in the lassitude, he couldn't seem to keep still, his feet thumping against the ground from time to time, setting off a series of glimmering lights on his shoes. His long-fingered hands, too, were restless, and threaded through the manicured strands of lawn in time to the words he spoke. He knew a lot, which left him talking for quite some time. There was Alpha Centaurii, and there was Polaris, and here was Orion, and the wolf in the moon, and there was Sirius, and Archenar, and here was Bootes, and...

The other boy, probably the younger, seemed to be listening politely for most of the inexhaustible ramble. He shattered the illusion finally, only when his friend paused at last, probably to change stories. "Jack?" he asked. "Have you ever been in love?"

The older boy was quiet for a long time, long enough that the younger turned his head to make sure nothing had changed. "Doctor?" he clarified, studying the pale, freckled face in the moonlight.

There was a flinch and the other boy looked away. "Strange question," the Doctor allowed with a suppressed sigh. "Where do you get these things from, Giles? It's not as if..."

Giles snorted by way of interruption, and sat up next to the Doctor, wondering if this would be a good time to knock the other boy down the hill. It wasn't. "I can't read you," he reminded the Doctor, because the other boy's face wasn't a match for his tone of voice, not remotely. 

The Doctor's delicate, nearly feminine, face was somehow more distant than the moon he looked up at. His eyes, normally a warm and strange gold, seemed silver and icy in the crystalline light. His ginger hair was splashed with purple by the night, and he seemed every bit as alien as he was, as he usually pretended not to be. Giles was used to both of his aspects, the mask he wore, and the otherworldly truth, but it was rare for the Doctor to let it show so absolutely. 

In Giles experience, it meant he didn't care for the question. At this point, Giles usually found a way to change the subject, because it was usually someone else asking things, and it was one of his jobs, as the Doctor's companion, to distract. He did it as much for the Doctor's sake as for whoever they were talking to, because usually when the Doctor got strange, things got bad right after that.

He didn't know what to do this time. He took a deep breath and looked for any star in the sky to ask about, anything, really, when the Doctor sighed heavily and sat up next to him. Sometimes, Giles wondered if they were even vaguely similar in age after all.

"I fall in love every day," the Doctor said in a weary tone that made his twelve year old's face look like a complete fiction. "It's reasonably common, among thinking species, to be absolutely adoring of any number of things at once."

Giles wanted to call him on it, he really, really did, because that wasn't the question he'd asked. Everyone, anyone, knew the Doctor fell in love with a new piece of candy every few minutes. That wasn't...

"Of course, that's not what you meant," the Doctor added, almost as if the words were being jerked out of him. "You're talking about people."

"Yes," Giles said. "Winara..."

The Doctor's grin was like morning for just a second. "Oh, her," he said, a bright and shining tease in his tone. "Should've seen this coming, I suppose."

Giles told himself he wasn't blushing. At least in the darkness it didn't matter much. "It's not like that," he grumbled. "It's just she kept saying..."

"Of course," the Doctor allowed, not quite graciously, and Giles was convinced once again that they were both adolescents. 

Silence fell, a funny, night-time silence somewhere between nervousness and contentment, a pause where nothing really has to be said, but so many things have been left unsaid. Giles picked up a rock and turned it over in his hand.

"It's like that," the Doctor said, suddenly, emphatically.

Confusion didn't even begin to cover Giles thought on that, until he realized the Doctor was gesturing at his rock. "How?" Giles asked, and traced a set of funny parallel lines on the rock with his fingers.

"Falling in love is mostly fascination. Someone's not like you, and yet they appeal to everything that appeals to you. They're interesting, they're attractive, they're fascinating. That's falling in love. It's almost too easy." Then, his voice grew quiet. "Being in love, staying in love, those are different. That's where the hard part comes in."

"Because people change?" That's why his mother and father had been fighting right before his father was kidnapped.

"Yes, and sometimes because they don't." He shook his head. "There's a lot to it, I could go on for days. Well, but I can always go on for days..."

"Too right," Giles said with a snort of laughter.

"Couldja maybe let it alone?" the Doctor asked, his eyes twinkling as he met Giles' grin. "I'm hardly the only one. People have written books, novels, poetry, entire libraries, dedicated to the simple fact that sometimes, every once in awhile, someone happens to run into someone else, and they become more than they ever were apart."

Giles blinked. It sounded like his grandparents, and his cousin and her husband, and like his sister and that girl she'd been with since they were old enough to walk, too. "But, what about..."

The Doctor's words went on, but the look on his face had grown distant again, very far away, and Giles knew that expression as well as his own name. He wondered now if he'd finally found out what the Doctor was thinking of when there was no one around him. "Falling in love is whirlwind fast, it's usually terrible and fun and strange. It can be sad and beautiful, and it can be over just as fast as it happened. Being in love is different. It's choice. Lots and lots of choices, over the course of a lifetime."

Giles thought of his parents again, and this time he wondered if his dad would even want to go back when they found him. "What if one of them goes away?"

There was a very, very long pause, this time, so long that Giles was almost sure the Doctor had nodded off to sleep or something. He looked up. The sorrow, the hollow, endless, aching pain in the Time Lord's young face told the absolute truth about him. He was ancient, and he had been in agony every day for ages. "It hurts," he breathed. 

Giles looked away. The Doctor cleared his throat, and seemed to shake himself, and when Giles looked back, he'd put the pain away, where ever he usually kept it. "It hurts, but it doesn't always hurt. And there are the memories that make it worth it." He grinned then, that bright, beatific smile that made everyone want to do whatever he said, and his gaze darted up to the moon, and then back. "And sometimes even if they're gone, they still stay with you forever." 

The Doctor stood up and wandered around for a few minutes, but Giles hardly noticed him, absorbed in processing the new information. He was still working on it, really, when the Doctor flopped down next to him again, and thumped Giles squarely on the arm. "Oi!" Giles protested, the whole subject very nearly forgotten. "What was that for?"

"Did I tell you what you needed to know, Jill?" the Doctor asked. He grinned, then, and Giles had never seen anyone fail so badly at looking so innocent.

"Don't call me Jill!" Giles protested. "That's a girl's name!"

"You started it!" the Doctor answered gleefully, and he poked Giles in the side with a tickling finger.

Giles decided that now was a good time to knock the Time Lord down the hill. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it.

The two boys scuffled there in the moonlight, laughing and shouting and cursing mildly, and a tall blue box loomed at the foot of the hill, waiting for them to get finished playing and get back to work. 

Overhead, the wolf in the moon howled her endless promise to the listening sky.


End file.
